architecture what is it?

architecture and function

The university should never teach practical things because practical things are a running condition, it is not a set condition… In the marketplace it's free and dispersed by opportunity and opportunism...In the University there should be desire: in the marketplace there's need; and the place between, the forum, should be the place where need and desire are both considered.

Louis KahnAn interview, VIA magazine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 11 January 69

definitions of architecture

What is architecture anyway?

Is it the vast collection of the various buildings which have been built to please the varying taste of the various lords of mankind? I think not. No, I know that architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.

So architecture I know to be a Great Spirit.

-Frank Lloyd Wright, from AN ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE, 1939

The Architect is the rival of nature, and out of it can form another nature...he can subject the world to the newness that stimulates the chance movements of his imagination.

-Claude-Nicholas Ledoux (18th/19th century)

Pantheon, Rome A.D. 120-4 Guggenheim, New York 1959 Guggenheim, Bilbao 1997

Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens 447-432 B.C.

San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (facade), Rome Italy, 1665-76

I would certainly never have entered this profession only to become a copyist.

-Francesco Borromini

Architecture is the will of the epoch translated into space. Until this simple truth is clearly recognized, then new architecture will be uncertain and tentative. Until then it must remain a chaos of undirected forces. The question as to the nature of architecture is of decisive importance. It must be understood that all architecture is bound up with its own time, that it can only be manifested in living tasks and in the medium of its epoch. In no age has it

Notre-Dame, Paris West Facade, 1163

We who love architecture and recognize it as the great sense of structure in whatever is—music, painting, sculpture, or life itself—we must somehow act as intermediaries—maybe missionaries.

Le Corbusier: La mer Dizzy GillespiePablo Picasso: Three Musicians

Renzo Piano on Architecture

Santiago Calatrava on Architecture

telling a story

architecture vs. building

architecture is an art

Architecture goes beyond providing mere shelter.

of just pure function

The purpose of architecture is to enrich the lives of those who come in contact with those works.

The purpose of architecture, the purpose of art, is to evoke a strong, positive, emotional,

memorable response.

Professor David Niland describes architecture as art with toilets

an order, not the order

Architecture, as opposed to building is the realization of a manifest order, appropriately conceived, logically developed, conditioned and disciplined, coherent through consistency, animated with wit,

and enlivened with spirit.

A work of architecture must address a single, strong, identifiable idea that is developed through the details.

The design must play upon the single idea with all parts relating back to and informing the whole.

Profile and contour are the touchstone of the Architect. Here he reveals himself as artist or mere engineer...There is here no longer any question of custom, nor of tradition, nor of construction, nor of adaptation to utilitarian

needs-Le Corbusier

Architectural design cannot be charted. It starts with the emotional, it starts with the intuitive.

there is a tendency is to take something simple and turn it into something that is so complex that it becomes incoherent.

the essence of architecture is very modest.